M15: Hunter Ranger Class Changes

Comments

I hope devs consider longstrider's buff to last at least 1 second more for module 16, currently, the buff lasts 4 seconds and basicly it takes half a second to get out of the "encounter lock time animation" and casting powers like gushing wound or hawk shot takes another second, so you end up with ~2,7 seconds of real buff to "enjoy". And also consider Hindering Strike's charges to benefit from cooldown reductions, like Blade flurry from TR, and reduce it's "reapply time", because there not much point on having a power that uses charges if theres a "cooldown" between charges. Overall, that would help Trapper a little more with it's flow in battle.

What I would suggest is that the buff to the user's damage from Longstrider's Shot should not take effect until the player uses his/her next attack. That ability was originally obviously written with either archery or Marauder's Rush in mind but in reality archery is dead in pve thanks to awful decisions by the dev team, trapper is dead in pve thanks to awful decisions and years of failure to respond to known issues by the dev team, and no one playing combat wants to waste an encounter power on Marauder's when it would screw up the one and only useful pve rotation the class has. So we have to, at best, use Forest Ghost before longstriders and hope that the speed buff from it will allow us to close on a target and use Gushing Wound before our 4 seconds are up.

However, in boss fights, most bosses will simply walk away from a player using Gushing Wound because of its absurdly looooooooooooooooooooooong animation, or use a control/interrupt ability so that Gushing Wound does not land at all and the Lonstrider's Shot buff expires without being useful to the player at all. If there's another good DPS toon, fine - it can either srike from range or it's a GWF and benefits from the control immunity of Unstoppable or it's a TR and benefits from the immunity of ITC or Duelist's Flurry. Of course, the devs have ignored our years of requests for some kind of control avoidance/break.

So the solution could also be to add a control immunity during the period of Longstrider's Shot, add a control immunity to Forest Ghost (and it would be nice if they deleted the time-consuming and buggy animation of Forest Ghost as well), and to be fair extend the LS buff by one second to allow players to close on the target and actually attack. Alternatively, the issue could be addressed by shortening the looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong animation of Gushing Wound so that it is less likely to simply miss or be interrupted.

Any one of those fixes would address a longstanding player complaint. The combination of them might actually put us on the path to HR being a competitive DPS class.

I understand that is Hard to make HR recieve the buffs from melee classes since the will be at range but in next rework pls think about this:

I think that the only 2 ways to make archers usefull in a party

1-) Turn them into a HEAVY a single target debuffer2-) Aloow us to recive the buffs, 2 ways here

2.1) Give us some feat that would link us with the other 2 or 4 party members2.2) give us a encounter that would fire something (being a arrow/root/cloud/dummie) this object or area could be linked to the archer and buffs and heals is not that unfair because any mob that spawn near teh ranger will be faar from the party and if he fall dead from ranged mob/boss attack will be far away for a revive...

Plus dont turn archer into a "camper sniper" because the game mechanics dont allow that in most of places.

I understand that is Hard to make HR recieve the buffs from melee classes since the will be at range but in next rework pls think about this:

I think that the only 2 ways to make archers usefull in a party

1-) Turn them into a HEAVY a single target debuffer2-) Aloow us to recive the buffs, 2 ways here

2.1) Give us some feat that would link us with the other 2 or 4 party members2.2) give us a encounter that would fire something (being a arrow/root/cloud/dummie) this object or area could be linked to the archer and buffs and heals is not that unfair because any mob that spawn near teh ranger will be faar from the party and if he fall dead from ranged mob/boss attack will be far away for a revive...

Plus dont turn archer into a "camper sniper" because the game mechanics dont allow that in most of places.

I understand that is Hard to make HR recieve the buffs from melee classes since the will be at range but in next rework pls think about this:

I think that the only 2 ways to make archers usefull in a party

1-) Turn them into a HEAVY a single target debuffer2-) Aloow us to recive the buffs, 2 ways here

2.1) Give us some feat that would link us with the other 2 or 4 party members2.2) give us a encounter that would fire something (being a arrow/root/cloud/dummie) this object or area could be linked to the archer and buffs and heals is not that unfair because any mob that spawn near teh ranger will be faar from the party and if he fall dead from ranged mob/boss attack will be far away for a revive...

Plus dont turn archer into a "camper sniper" because the game mechanics dont allow that in most of places.

Number1: Meta is simply an aggregate of all exploitable imbalances in the game. The only reason why it's not being labelled exploits is because Cryptic's hands are tied by lack of resources...until now. They should get rid of it permanently so all classes can be balanced for solo, random, high-end or pvp.

Number 2: The reason why Archery is perceived as weak or "not useful" is because it hits considerably less in DPS than, say the incredibly perfect class, the GWF.( I normally don't poke/check/inspect on other class abilities, but their Hidden Daggers encounter is 40% on all melee attacks, while our Archery Capstone is going to be 40% on a single target. So their encounter is already far stronger than our capstone. And that's beside the GWF capstone ).

Problem:

If GWF hits 20,

Archery hits 10.

Solutions: Make GWF hit 10 or Make Archery hit 20 or Make them both hit 15 or any equal number.

Your solution: Make Archery "useful in a party" by giving them party buffs. Now, the GWF hits 30 and Archer hits 15.

It does not solve the class DPS imbalance, but rather perpetuates it.

I'm no Star Wars fan, but I know Luke Skywalker lost his hand at the end of the Empire Strikes Back (?) So now he's considerably weaker in DPS than Darth Vader.

Solution: Buff Luke and give him a new prehensile prosthetic, therefore he can be a match to Darth Vader.

And by analogy, your Solution: Make Luke Skywalker, a Jedi Cheerleader so he can be useful to the rebellion.

Why are they trying to promote garbage like boar skin? Do they even realize how many ticks of damage someone can take in 0.1 seconds? Pop it, and you're instantly with no defensive buffs. Sacrifice an entire slot for that, when a DC, SW, OP have way better, that remain on you.

Just remove all of this useless utility and give the HR some proper damage buffs.

I don't understand their logic. They won't touch GWF destroyer, but will mess TR up, and are too terrified to buff the HR and SW. This game isn't going to last forever, and at the rate that they actually touch classes, everyone is screwed.

Right so we wont be getting any further changes in mod 15 to HR but here is something you can work on in mod 16 (If you're not planning on butchering the class just yet).

Combat HR is currently in a good spot in terms of DPS.Trapper HR is getting weaker and weaker as the number of mods increase (plz thorned roots scaling when?)Archery is ...weak... very weak when compared to the other two trees but hybrid archery can dish out some 'okay' dps. Its still nowhere near our full potential of the class (stillness of the forest has to be reverted...).

Okay so here are my suggestions to some powers in general.

Aimed shot and aimed strike could definitely use a buff. The extremely long animation is just absurd, it needs a much quicker animation. Being stuck in animation for a few seconds is not fun at all. Also aimed strike has a clunky aim, even if youre aiming at the target it doesnt strike the target half the time. Gushing wounds have the exact same animation but oddly it hits whichever target youre aiming at.

People forget marauders rush & escape exist, it could be a very nice encounter for combat HRs if only it didnt hit like a wet noodle. Some bleed damage any changes to this power that would make it viable would be appreciated.

Rain of arrows and rain of swords. Rain of arrows is pretty good with archery , nice damage but ughh animation lock is kinda annoying. Rain of swords is by far one of the WORST encounters EVER. It does a laughable amount of damage, with about 60k power and max crit and armor pen , I was hitting for 5k per bleed tick with this encounter on a level 73 dummy....wtf is that damage??

Boar hide....whats the point of this? The DR isnt all that great and even with primal instincts buff this encounter will probably never be used.

Cold steel hurricane on stormwarden path....useless. It looks cool , doesnt do much damage and has a ridiculous animation lock. For 100% of action points spend this is HORRIBLE when compared to disruptive shot or forest ghost.

Longstrider shot. Its amazing. Everyone loves this encounter and its melee counterpart. BUT , as people mentioned already the duration of the dmg bonus is really low. By the time we jump away from an enemy and fire the shot then rush in for a gushing wounds hit , the damage bonus is probably long gone. 2 or 3 seconds increase on the buff would be VERY much appreciated.As mentioned above with the reaaaallly long animation time for some of out encounters , gushing wounds is one of them. I dont have a problem with the animation considering the amount of damage this encounter can do but again...a reduce in animation time would be appreciated by everyone.

The really long animation time on most of the encounters HAS to be reduced. HR is a very fluid class, fast paced encounter spamming and switching is our kit. If the encounters are going to take forever to cast then we loose that fluid combat aspect.

Another thing that came to my mind. PLEASE PLEASE give us a bit of crowd control immunity. PLEASE.GWF has their class feature and TRs have impossible to catch, both of them has CC immunity to help with their dps so how come HRs have 0 skills that provide cc immunity other than a dodge that barely lasts a second and foxes cunning ..which also ...lasts barely a second.Some form of CC immunity would be sooooo much appreciated by every HR player ,I love the idea of adding cc immunity to forest ghost, a few seconds of invisibility and cc immunity would be awesome!

Thats just my opinions on encounters and powers for mod 16. Its hopeless asking for changes for mod 15 right before the it drops so im really hoping to see some good changes for mod 16. pls.

I think the new stacks mechanic for aots is better, but it should 3 stacks aswell or it should stay at 3% dmg.

(Also the description at the start of the thread should be updated)

As everyone keeps stating too thorned roots should scale up correctly as it's our main source of damage

To increase the viability of the ranger (and also cws) the control effects should be getting brought back into the game.

Allow the hunter ranger to take its place as dps/control hybrid class.
Take away boss immunity to cc and allow control classes the ability to apply effects on bosses such as slow or to interupt their attacks. It wouldn't require full stun lock on them meaning we won't make bosses too easy and it wouldn't need more dps to make the class worth taking in to end game content.
(If having strong enough controller chatacters would mean being able to interupt the arcolith spin for example they would be much more welcome in cr, even at the cost of some group dps.)
One of the game's bigger problems right now is that there are only 3 roles
Dps, healer/buffer and tank.

Which is compounded by the gwf being better at dps and easier to buff than other dps classes.. Why take in any of the others!?

That's so unprofessional. If u cant finish what u have started, don't start it. If you have started it, make sure u finish it no matter what. Has mod 6 ever teach u guys anything? But It does not matter. This isn't the 1st time u guys do something unprofessional like this. A pity how a nice game like this end up.

So with the release date approaching, so far we have:1) a bunch of meaningless tweaks that serve no purpose;2) narrowly avoided the total ruination of the trapper path but at the cost of a ridiculous nerf to AotS because the devs didn't completely fix their mistake;3) The ruination of the archer path and the end of HR in pvp until at least the next mod;4) Half of a fix to the dodge, which is till too short to be truly useful;5) No help at all for low dps and ridiculous, awkward, long animations.

I looked foreward to play my trapper vs a combat today, see how 3x2,5% fared vs old 2x3.check out the new professions. Have fun, discovered i got 2x2.5% and disconnected 3 times doing professions. Im playing total war atm

Only thing I ask is that they boost storm step action a bit more. Give it movement speed as well and it'll be usable. In neither the current or new form I see no use for it at all, especially in end game The nerf to trapper sucks but it's not too bad. Imo I think combat and trapper will be tied for damage in the next mod, that is if ca is back to normal. Now you guys need to fix archery Since it's harder to speed up animations and the dps on it is very low you should triple the damage of all ranged powers Literally. It's currently so bad that even if you do that then it will only be okish for dps. The primal instincts buffs sucks. The reworked buffs suck. I literally see nothing useful about all this except when your in a non optimal group in an epic trial maybe.

Edit scratch that You guys need to buff trapper a bit more and at least give back the serpent dmg. How the heck did trapper go from being top dps hr build to the middle in two mods??

I play an HR, all ranged Dragonborn character. I just got my crit chance up to mid 90's (with buffs) and since the updates, my stats are staying at mid 60's. I'm totally confused on how I have lost 30 crit chance. I've gone over all my boons, companions, gear, everything and cannot find how I could loose that much crit chance.

Is Anyone else having this problem? My character is now practically worthless and the extra $$ I just paid to upgrade to Dragonborn is worthless. It's already an uphill battle to get an HR up to anything close to other DPS, and although I'm very glad to see that there are changes being made, my character has suffered tremendously from this update and I cannot find anyway to get it back.

I play an HR, all ranged Dragonborn character. I just got my crit chance up to mid 90's (with buffs) and since the updates, my stats are staying at mid 60's. I'm totally confused on how I have lost 30 crit chance. I've gone over all my boons, companions, gear, everything and cannot find how I could loose that much crit chance.

Is Anyone else having this problem? My character is now practically worthless and the extra $$ I just paid to upgrade to Dragonborn is worthless. It's already an uphill battle to get an HR up to anything close to other DPS, and although I'm very glad to see that there are changes being made, my character has suffered tremendously from this update and I cannot find anyway to get it back.

Where are you standing, or where were you standing where you checked your buffs?

If you checked in an AI zone or something similar, you probably we just under the effects of the lower level stat curves. Go back to a regular level 70 zone and you should be fine.

If you checked in the stronghold or any level 70 instance, then idk. There is nothing else that I can think of that could drastically drop your Crit by 40% or more.

I play an HR, all ranged Dragonborn character. I just got my crit chance up to mid 90's (with buffs) and since the updates, my stats are staying at mid 60's. I'm totally confused on how I have lost 30 crit chance. I've gone over all my boons, companions, gear, everything and cannot find how I could loose that much crit chance.

Is Anyone else having this problem? My character is now practically worthless and the extra $$ I just paid to upgrade to Dragonborn is worthless. It's already an uphill battle to get an HR up to anything close to other DPS, and although I'm very glad to see that there are changes being made, my character has suffered tremendously from this update and I cannot find anyway to get it back.

Where are you standing, or where were you standing where you checked your buffs?

If you checked in an AI zone or something similar, you probably we just under the effects of the lower level stat curves. Go back to a regular level 70 zone and you should be fine.

If you checked in the stronghold or any level 70 instance, then idk. There is nothing else that I can think of that could drastically drop your Crit by 40% or more.

A couple of ranged-spec HRs in my guild have said the same thing, but when examined do not have sufficient crit stat and bonuses to have had such a high total crit % chance to begin with (not having to do with level scaling as in AI campaign). We suggested that they check their companion stats and equipment, asked if they had previously benefited from the multiple companion bug, everything we could think of.

Either they are all reading their stats incorrectly in the same way (which is possible), or perhaps there was some kind of bug affecting their crit chance or their tooltip? I don't think enough people are insa-- I mean dedicated enough to play a ranged PvE build that such a bug would become common knowledge.

I play an HR, all ranged Dragonborn character. I just got my crit chance up to mid 90's (with buffs) and since the updates, my stats are staying at mid 60's. I'm totally confused on how I have lost 30 crit chance. I've gone over all my boons, companions, gear, everything and cannot find how I could loose that much crit chance.

Is Anyone else having this problem? My character is now practically worthless and the extra $$ I just paid to upgrade to Dragonborn is worthless. It's already an uphill battle to get an HR up to anything close to other DPS, and although I'm very glad to see that there are changes being made, my character has suffered tremendously from this update and I cannot find anyway to get it back.

Just to ask the stupid question, are you accounting for the 25% Crit chance lost from the stillness change?

Long story short: HR community has lots of longstanding valid complaints and good ideas about how to fix them, the only goal being to make the class an equal partner in pve and pvp.

Devs completely ignore this and put someone in charge who doesn't have the first clue about the class and has obviously never played it. His ideas are so laughably bad it's difficult to believe he's serious.

Player reaction to this gets almost completely ignored except that the AotS change ends up being a completely uncalled for nerf instead of a completely uncalled for change to trapper play style.

A class that players have spent years trying to build into a DPS role is now required to play a support role that few or none of its players wish to in order to participate in endgame content. The class has been written out of pvp.

After some testing a new Combat Advantage alternative build, I'm back to Falcon build. It sure is stronger close ranged, but I miss the Falcon range.

M16 Archer PvE Suggestions:

First of all, set aside PvP. NW developers try to juggle PvE and PvP at the same time resulting in a half-solution like SOTF for PvE and something that the PvPers do not like. All the Devs have to do is add the falcon range buff over the party buff range. Or squish the maximum range values commensurate with damage, or just give Archery +%damage based using Ranged attacks like other Melee classes. Then go back to PvP and adjust the values.

Please avoid the "We can't do this in PvE archery, it will be too strong for PvP". Why not just adjust the values for PvP? You're throwing the 99% PvE population for the 1% PvP population. And NW is not even a PvP game. When will the higher-ups acknowledge NW is a nominal PvP game?

Feats:Hasty Retreat - Should be a pure and simple Speed buff, active all the time. I suggest +15-20% speed. SOTF forces us to stand still so we get hit and we move faster? The point of range is not to be hit at all in the first place.

SOTF - PvE wise (because PvPers said it's a disaster), it liberated the archers from the no-buff catch-22 dead zones (too close, no self buff; too far, no party buff), but the numbers are quite anemic. I just looked at combat and they are being given straight up +50% with no reservations or limits. Each level should be 5% to be competitive. Combat HR have DOUBLE our Archery DPS. They are the closest ones to the GWF, which is utterly perfect, fully synergized DPS and has zero downside.

Rising Focus - This feat is underwhelming. +15% Crit Severity +15% Power stacking if we hit crits is quite weak for a penultimate Feat tier. Crit Severity should be replaced with something else or just make it purely power.

Capstone - Our capstone is too inferior and simplistic. if we really are limited to a single target buff, then the numbers have to go up to at least 100% and not 40%. It has no synergistic effect with our other feats.

Since Archery is crit based, we need bonus effects tied to our crit, Much like control effects were tied to TR Scoundrel Capstone.If we are limited to single target, then every crit increases Predator damage - starting at base 40% - on the target by 10%, stacking up to 100%.

GWF hidden daggers encounter gives them +40% damage on ALL melee targets while Combat HR Feat gives them +50% damage on ALL melee attacks. These are better than our capstone. We are limited to SINGLE target and 40% only?

Skills to improve:

Hawk Shot: Need to widen the confines of the straight-line AOE. It's far too narrow and easily miss so much mobs.

My last suggestion is the Devs leak out plans so it can be critiqued first. Archery needs a synergistic build that incorporates feats, skills, features and dailies. The goal is not to make Archery overpowered and broken, but just competitive enough with top dps classes like Combat HR and GWF. We already know that GF DPS is going away.

@nitocris83@balanced#2849
In the hopes that you guys are still reading this, I have to say I like the changes to combat hr. The only issue I have is single target. In combat with mobs we have the options of using both split strike and clear the ground for damage depending on the situation. On single target it is mostly split strike .Aimed strike is ok but I find myself losing damage sometimes due to time it takes to hit so I'll never use it.
My question /suggestion to you all is can you increase the dps of rapid strike by at least 10% minimum? (not accounting for the main hand's bonus).That would help a bit with single target and Its not game breaking in anyway way. When you revamped combat, rapid strike was the best melee at will in single target due to how flurry proccd. When you changed the timing of flurry to proc at the end of encounter that was no longer the case. It's not as strong as careful attack used to be so that seems like a reasonable suggestion and it'll be a step in the right direction for single target. Especially since the buffed classes are stronger on single target now.

Also please change storm step action. I cannot think of any reason to use this power. It's effect is something that could maybe be used in early leveling or for an archery build But even then it's not good at all. Our daily powers are so terrible (damage wise) that there is no reason to use this. The dailies are great for utility however. If you guys changed it to something like, "gives bonus speed AND recovery" that would be so much more powerful. Pathfinder action has speed bonus why not storm step? It Literally has storm step in the name so you would assume it's a speed boost. Or even something like "increases the damage of at wills by % for 5 seconds" that would be perfect. For it to be so far up the power tree it should instead be one of the first class features to unlock in its current state because that's how useless it is. This would help archery a ton as well as combat.

Also another suggestion is to make aimed strikes individual ticks adjust to buffs and not to fixed damage to buffs at the time of use. This alone would make it more useful for single target damage I'm sorry for constantly posting about this but I feel I need to. You gave us great aoe damage which is cool but single target needs an adjustment as well

@ibemin0x are you capable of reading at a fifth grade level minimum? Do you perhaps have some trouble just comprehending what was said? If so I have a free account at skillshare that might be of use to you, if they have those sort of classes... Enough of the negativity, you get the point I already said that I like the changes to combat. I tried not to mention my massive disdain for the nerf to careful attack that happened while I was gone. What I was bringing up in the conversation were pretty weak powers that nobody really uses so you can stop right there. Now trapper needs a lot of love. You have no idea how much i hate that they nerfed trapper When I left the game combat and trapper were tied with trapper having an edge over combat on single target due to roots and careful attack but now trappers are wanted as a buff bot. I hate that they took one of the best classes (if skilful enough) in the game and made it a one trick pony as far as dps goes. I hate being asked to be a buff bot even though I'll do it a few times anyway. They completely destroyed trapper and careful attack. They already got a lot of players saying that so I felt like shouldn't have to mention my feelings on it. Now I'm just trying to make the best out of it by asking for changes to improve our single target damage since they don't want to make careful attack work the way it used to. That is all, now stay blessed ..

It's obvious that they don't want pathfinder to be a damage dealing paragon anymore. It makes sense to only ask for changes to storm warden. Maybe in mod 16 they'll revive the storm warden trapper again That'll be a nice blast from the past